Please note to download premium images you also need to join as a free member..

You can also save the photos without the registration - but only in small and average sizes, and some of them will have the site's watermark. Please simply click your right mouse button and save the image.

You can also save the images without the membership - but only in small and average sizes, and some of them may have the site's watermark. Please simply click your right mouse button and save the image.

You are trying to download a premium photo in full size.

This photo can be downloaded in full size only by free members of Free-Photos.biz.

Please click here to become a free member to be able to download all photos
from Free-Photos.biz without limitations.

You can also save this image without the membership - but only in small and average sizes, and it may have the site's watermark. Please simply click your right mouse button and save the image.

This photo was viewed 2 times and was downloaded in full size
2 times.

This photo was liked 0 times

If you are a member, please
login
in order to see the source link of the above image.

Summary

Description

English: The galaxy captured in this image, called UGC 12158, certainly isn’t camera-shy: this spiral stunner is posing face-on to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, revealing its structure in fine detail.

UGC 12158 is an excellent example of a barred spiral galaxy in the Hubble sequence — a scheme used to categorise galaxies based on their shapes. Barred spirals, as the name suggest, feature spectacular swirling arms of stars that emanate from a bar-shaped centre. Such bar structures are common, being found in about two thirds of spiral galaxies, and are thought to act as funnels, guiding gas to their galactic centres where it accumulates to form newborn stars. These aren’t permanent structures: astronomers think that they slowly disperse over time, so that the galaxies eventually evolve into regular spirals.

The appearance of a galaxy changes little over millions of years, but this image also contains a short-lived and brilliant interloper — the bright blue star just to the lower left of the centre of the galaxy is very different from the several foreground stars seen in the image. It is in fact a supernova inside UGC 12158 and much further away than the Milky Way stars in the field — at a distance of about 400 million light-years! This stellar explosion, called SN 2004ef, was first spotted by two British amateur astronomers in September 2004 and the Hubble data shown here form part of the follow-up observations.

This picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Images through blue (F475W, coloured blue), yellow (F606W, coloured green) and red (F814W, coloured red) as well as a filter that isolates the light from glowing hydrogen (F658W, also coloured red) have been included. The exposure times were 1160 s, 700 s, 700 s and 1200 s respectively. The field of view is about 2.3 arcminutes across.

This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. Hubble material is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that NASA and ESA is credited as the source of the material. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute and for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre under Contract NAS5-26555. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or copyright statement at spacetelescope.org.

The images at Free-Photos.biz come mainly from Wikimedia Commons or from our own production. The photos are either in the public domain, or licensed under free linceses: Free-Photos.biz license, GPL, Creative Commons or Free-Art license. Some very few other photos where uploaded to Free-Photos.biz by our users and released into the public domain or into free usage under another free license (like GPL etc.)

While the copyright and licensing information supplied for each photo is believed to be accurate, Free-Photos.biz does not provide any warranty regarding the copyright status or correctness of licensing terms. If you decide to reuse the images from Free-Photos.biz, you should verify the copyright status of each image just as you would when obtaining images from other sources.

The use of depictions of living or deceased persons may be restricted in some jurisdictions by laws regarding personality rights. Such images are exhibited at Free-Photos.biz as works of art that serve higher artistic interests.